Politics

Mike Cleveland

Stop Him Before He Writes More

mcleveland@cabinet.com

OK, it’s official: I hate our cat. She’s taken to sleeping on the stove. The STOVE. Where I come to cook my food, where my children … (“Godfather II”). Anyway, she sleeps on the stove which, fortunately for her, is an electric stove so there is no pilot light to set her alight.

It’s a pretty big jump for a 21-year-old cat, but she makes it every night and then objects when we take her off.

And she can make the jump from a sideboard in the dining room to the butcher block. It’s about three feet and it’s an up hill jump. It’s weird. Then she goes outside and spends all day sleeping in the grass. Strange cat.

Speaking of strange cats, here’s this from John Steinbeck’s “East of Eden”:

“You can boast about anything if it’s all you have. Maybe the less you have, the more you are required to boast.”

Remind you of anyone?

Here’s a quote from Tony Soprano: “Whatever happened to the strong, silent type?”

Well, he didn’t get elected president, that’s for sure. We got somebody who should have read Steinbeck.

* And now, as they used to say on “Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-in,” for something completely different … I don’t know why I just had this thought but …

Do you know that NOBODY is pro-abortion? Not a soul, not even women who have had an abortion.

They are pro-ABORTION RIGHTS. They are in favor of the RIGHT to choose an abortion. But they don’t recommend just running out and getting one. That would be pro-abortion.

Nope. Pro-RIGHTS. Pro-CHOICE.

That’s it. Simple, when you want to think about it.

* I wish baseball would just go away and never come back. As Phil Mushnick of the New York Post likes to point out, it’s a stupid game when nearly every one features more strikeouts than hits and everybody swings for the fences, plus nobody knows how to bunt. Hit and run? Nah. Just swing for the fences.

Oh, and Mushnick laments, nobody likes to run to first base anymore, even on a third-strike passed ball. Too much effort for too little money — about $20 million a year. Yeah, but other guys are making more, whine, whine, so why should I run?

* Football? Jerry Jones, owner of the Dallas Cowboys, is truly whacky. Add two games to the season and it will lessen the number of injuries to players? Did he take math in high school? He certainly missed his college logic course.

To Jerry, Cause and Effect is a country western duo — Jimmy Cause and Big Phil Effect.

When Jerry Jones says ANYTHING, it’s OK to scream.

* Speaking of screaming, I try not to get too nutso behind anything said by Donald Trump, buuuuuuut … There’s this headline from the New York Daily News:

“Trump claims he has ‘100 pictures’ of Robert Mueller ‘kissing and hugging’ James Comey.”

I’ve never been particularly attracted to pictures of people kissing – men kissing women, men kissing men, women kissing women, doesn’t matter. It’s just not a big turnon, buuuuuuuut …

Pictures of Robert Mueller and James Comey kissing and hugging? I’d settle for just seeing one. If Trump has 100, he must have been following them around: Voyeurism Trump Style.

Too weird. Except … I KNOW there are people who believe it. I KNOW there are Trumpians out there who say, “Yeah, I knew it. Now THAT’S collusion. The FBI should investigate that. And Hillary. She can be locked up with Mueller and Comey. Yeah, lock ’em all up. Yeah.”

Seriously. SOMEBODY believes that. Guaranteed.

* Here’s my fervent hope: The Red Sox lose in the first round of the playoffs. I hope they lose to the Yankees, but I’ll settle for Oakland.

When I first moved up here, I rooted for the Red Sox. Then they became the 1970s Yankees, going nuts in the free agent market instead of building a team. It’s a little better now, what with several players up from the farms, but … Nah. Lose in the first round.

* A couple of quotes from Edward Kay’s “At Rope’s End,” a pretty good mystery:

“She had lots of piercings, including one in her nose, but all the studs and rings were nondescript. Her legs were mercifully free of the tattoos that marred so many otherwise beautiful young women these days.”

“Psychopaths are believed to represent only one percent of the general population. But some studies suggest that as many as one in ten CEOs are psychopaths. Do the math. That’s where it’s an evolutionary advantage: in a corrupt system that values profits over human welfare.”

The first quote can be argued: Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.

The second? ” … values profits over human welfare”? Welcome to the world.